Today, some thoughts about sewing machines. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
I
write these radio spots on a word processor. The
printer stand is my mother's old floor-model sewing
machine -- made in 1905. The sewing mechanism folds
down, leaving the top flat. That's where I put the
printer. The paper sits on the foot treadle below,
and it feeds up into the back of the printer. It's
all very neat. You'd think the sewing machine had
been designed as a printer-stand.
My mother never gave the machine up for an electric
model. She liked its movement -- the hand-foot
coordination. I like the florid art noveau design
of the cast-iron stand and the grain of the walnut
top -- the pretty wooden molding. I like knowing
that if push came to shove I could actually sew
with it.
The invention of the sewing machine was brought on
by the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, so much
fabric was being produced that someone had to
invent a machine to sew it all. In 1790 an
Englishman named Thomas Saint patented the crude
forbear of today's machines. For the next fifty
years, patent after patent chipped away at the
problem of making a machine do the complicated
things a human hand does when it sews.
The strongest all-around patent was one filed by
Elias Howe in 1846. It led to a spate of
thinly-veiled copies and to a patent war. The major
inventors finally had to form a sewing-machine
trust that paid Howe a handsome royalty. Of course,
the industrial giant that emerged from this trust
was the Singer company.
My mother's sewing machine was made by the
Willcox-Gibbs Company. It was founded around James
Gibbs's patent for a chain-stiching machine in
1856. The company was one of many that competed
with Singer by making less expensive machines. It
stayed in business at least through the 1960s. In
1859 Scientific American magazine
wrote about the Willcox-Gibbs machines. It said:
It is astonishing how, in a few years, the
sewing machine has made such strides in popular
favor [, going from] a mechanical wonder [to] a
household necessity ...
And that's what happened. Sewing machines took the
country by storm. They were revolutionary. They
changed American life.
When I was six, my mother had me lie down on a
piece of butcher paper. She drew a line around me
and used it as a pattern. She sewed up a human
figure, stuffed it with cotton, hem-stitched a face
on it, decked it with hair of brown yarn, and clad
it in a suit of my home-made clothes. Then she gave
me this life-sized alter ego as a playmate.
I look at the old machine and see my mother's
quirky imagination, her care for me, her
highly-honed mechanical skills -- I remember
American home life as it was so powerfully affected
by these beautiful and complex old "engines -- of
our ingenuity."
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
